In with the New

One of the things that make a New Yorker’s holiday heart clench just a little is the speed with which today’s beacon of light becomes tomorrow’s burnout case, kicked to the curb. The Christmas-tree business, of which we sing here, is in this city a wonderfully entrepreneurial one: in the weeks leading up to the holiday, sellers, some from as far away as Alaska, line up along the sidewalks, creating a fragrant, “Nutcracker”-worthy urban forest, and buyers happily traipse off with their trees wrapped in nylon mesh. But then, after the first week of January, those same trees, anxiously selected and triumphantly lofted home, are heaped brutally on the sidewalk, bits of tinsel still clinging to their needles, for the Department of Sanitation to haul away.

As with everything else in the city, a tight web of rules governs the rituals. The Coniferous Tree Exception in the city’s laws assures the right to sell trees on the street (“Storekeepers and peddlers may sell and display coniferous trees during the month of December”), and the Department of Sanitation actively encourages the sidewalk toss, while the Department of Parks and Recreation offers a greener option—MulchFest 2016 TreeCycle!—at designated locations around town. (The city’s most famous tree, the one at Rockefeller Center, is turned into lumber for Habitat for Humanity.) The sudden fall from glory to the gutter can prompt a kind of melancholy reflection, not just on the vanity of human wishes but on the mutability of human monuments.

It was oddly cheering, then, to learn recently that even the most impressive- and immovable-seeming of monuments associated with the winter solstice has some of this here-today-and-gone-tomorrow character. Stonehenge, still standing after thousands of years, was, apparently, quarried and originally constructed at a Neolithic site in Wales; many centuries later, it was taken apart and pulled on sledges about a hundred and forty miles east, to be rebuilt at its present location, on the Salisbury Plain, in England. Stonehenge’s central bluestones, the ones that form its inner “horseshoe,” can be matched with rock formations in Pembrokeshire that show traces of ancient quarrying. (Spinal Tap notwithstanding, it wasn’t the Druids who built Stonehenge but some other, more ancient group.) According to Mike Parker Pearson, a professor at University College London, who was the lead archeologist on the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which sought to penetrate the mysteries of the monument’s making, “It’s more likely that the stones were first used in a local monument, somewhere near the quarries, that was then dismantled and dragged off to Wiltshire”—making it the very model of a modern movable monument.

Stonehenge is not the only Neolithic monument that turns out to have more get-up-and-go in it than one might expect. As Parker Pearson points out, a sixty-five-ton rock that sits atop La Table des Marchand, in northern France, is part of a hundred-ton menhir, which was toted from several miles away, while another piece of the same stone ended up in a tomb in Gavrinis, also some distance from the original site. These “secondhand monuments,” as archeologists call them, can be found in many places: standing stones sometimes turn out to be scooting stones. Nor did the moving monument pass with the ancient past: London Bridge not long ago raced from London to Arizona, and the beautiful temples of Abu Simbel, in Egypt, were picked up and pulled back to higher ground, out of the way of the approaching Aswan flood.

In a moment, like ours, of so much panicky uncertainty, the news that the most timeless of all big stone things may be as mobile as a trailer home is comforting. There is more give and flex and second thoughts and pentimenti in Neolithic societies than we might have imagined. Neolithic leaders didn’t say, “It has ever been here, hallowed by our ancestors!” They said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s pack it on up and move it east. It’s easier than you might think.” Monuments moved and remade have been on the mind of this magazine in the past year, as we left Times Square for the new World Trade Center, built to replace the one destroyed fourteen years ago, on the worst day in the city’s modern history. Some trepidation accompanied the transfer, but the new building has become another home. The lesson in recovery of all kinds is that more is usually recoverable than we imagine.

Christmas and New Year’s are the ultimate recuperative holiday period, when we celebrate that which is leaving and that which is yet to come. This is true whether the interpretation is historical—in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun fades but always returns—or narrative: the baby is born; he is here to save the world. Winter-solstice rituals predate the Christian holiday, and it was part of the wisdom of the new faith to piggyback, spiritually, on the old, folding its cosmic message into the universal faith in returning light. Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, in turn, burn their candles, and fold their beliefs into those other festivals. What Fox News persists in calling “the war on Christmas” might better be described as a war for the light—an attempt to widen the spectrum of celebration and return it to its original universality. We broaden its meanings by recognizing its metamorphoses.

Needless to say, the archeologist’s discovery about the Welsh bluestones was quickly met with skepticism among some geologists, who insist that it is not human intent but mere glacial action that accounts for Stonehenge’s relocation. Whichever turns out to be true—a Stonehenge that was sledged from Wales to Wiltshire or one that slid there—the message remains. The Coniferous Tree Exception is not entirely an exception: the temporality of trees is, in the end, one with the temporality of everything else on earth, no matter how massive or stony or impressive. This larger truth about the mutability of our monuments is a somehow reassuring thought with which to greet the coming year. ♦

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of “The Table Comes First.”